Photo Hack Day NYC Recap — Aviary Blog

Photo Hack Day NYC Recap

On December 6th-7th, Aviary hosted Photo Hack Day 6 back in our hometown of NYC. This year’s event was hosted by Aviary and Adobe with help from our amazing sponsors: Shutterstock, Walgreens, Astra by Photoshelter, Twilio, FilePicker.io, Foursquare, Imagga, Behance and Adobe.

We kicked the weekend off on Saturday morning with bagels + coffee and immediately dived into our Keynote speech and API demos! Photo Hack Day NYC was opened up with a keynote address by Shutterstock, followed by a round of API presentations by our fantastic sponsors. Hacking began and we were off! 

Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness originality, and overall real-world value of the application.

And now…the winners!

1ST PLACE: SHORTS

Team: Joe Biggica, Matt Hamilton, Conor Hastings, Adrian Lin

Shorts is an app where users can create shorts — small collections of pictures — and share them with small groups of people. With the use of the edit feature, users can add a more personal touch to the pictures they share. 

2ND PLACE: HANG 

Team: Nick Ihm, Emily Duong, Matt Grasser and Hang Xu

We’re so obsessed with the act of taking photographs that we rarely reflect on the many images we’ve already taken. Compared to the instant gratification of digital photography, the time-consuming steps of editing, printing, and framing your photographs can be daunting. But the results can transform your space and can be so rewarding.

Hang streamlines this process for you. With this mobile tool, you can easily visualize complicated layouts with your photo library, with real time measurements, before having to commit to printing and framing.

CROWD FAVORITE: WOOFER

Team: Bettina Enriques, Brian Lam, Jackson Lee, Denise Burgess and Benjamin Masanga

Dog-owners everywhere share the same love and the same pain. They all love taking pictures of their dog, but they all feel the same frustration when trying to get their dog to look at just the right moment. That's where Woofer comes in.

Woofer is a mobile phone photo app for dog lovers that has the ability to play a variety of sounds to grab your dog's attention. Unlike our competitors, Woofer can record new sounds tailored to your dog and take pictures in burst mode.

These are only a few of the TONS of prizes we had at PHD NYC - thanks to our wonderful sponsors. For a complete list of API and Event prizes, as well as submissions, check out the PHD NYC Submissions List.  

Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Travis Beck (Shutterstock), Tobias Peggs (Aviary), Taylor Davidson (ex-kbs+ ventures), and Eric Snowden (Adobe) for having the difficult job of deciding among all of the amazing hacks submitted! 

Thanks also to our wonderful panelists, Liz Eswein (Laundry Service), Taylor Davidson (ex-kbs+ ventures), Eric Snowden (Adobe) and moderator Mike Mignano (Aviary), who helped us explore the future of mobile photography. 

For more photos of the event, search for the #PhotoHackNYC tag on Twitter. 

Congrats again to all of our winners, and thank you to our amazing sponsors who contributed amazing prizes! We had a ton of fun at Photo Hack Day NYC, and we hope to see you at the next one!

Cheers,

Photo Hack Day Team